Ericsson's move to focus on software is to hit another 2,200 jobs in Sweden, the telco vendor has announced.
The cuts focus on roles in R&D and supply, the company's statement says, but admin and sales roles will also be affected, along with external consultants.
The vendor says R&D remains important, but reducing the number of …

China's Alibaba and SAIC Motor Corp have decided the country needs to get its cars connected to the Internet, and have inked a $US160 million deal to get the ball wheels rolling.
According to Reuters, the joint venture between the two will be worth a billion yuan, and targets 2016 as the launch date for the Middle Kingdom's …

In the throes of an election campaign, the NSW Government has hit upon a way to guarantee that police can require people to unlock their phones: that's where Premier Mike Baird wants your driver's license to be.
Pitched as a money-saving measure because today's printed-plastic licences cost tens of millions of dollars, the …

Another data retention domino has fallen, with Bulgaria striking down its spooks'-charter laws as unconstitutional in a Constitutional Court challenge launched by that country's ombudsman.
The Sofia Globe reports that the bulk collection mandated by the country's Electronic Communications Act have been struck down, with the full …

Want to know if you can get fibre to the home instead of the node? It'll cost at least $300 just to ask the question, under a new “Technology Choice Policy” published by NBN Co.
The former “network extension” policy (which let satellite users ask about fixed wireless upgrades, and fixed wireless areas ask about fibre) was made …

Competition in the Australian broadband market is about to take another step backwards in favour of consolidation, with TPG announcing it's going to buy iiNet.
iiNet has long been a favourite of Australia's Internet users for doing battle with "big content" over its right to take piracy cases all the way to end users. It won the …

Three Queensland and one NSW locales will find out whether NBN Co's promise of downloads at 100 Mbps over hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) survives peak-hour traffic, after the company responsible for building Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) announced trial sites of the delivery medium.
In Queensland, Merrimac, Slacks Creek …

Juniper is touting performance, performance, and more performance in its traditional annual strategy release – at the same time, it probably hopes, pouring cold water on the emerging world of white box players.
The three planks of the strategy – routing, data centre switching, and firewalls – all claim significant lifts in …

Google subsidiary Nest has decided the next thing to be Internet of Thinged is going to be the sound system, and wants to get there first.
Shortly after irritating Dropcam users by telling them to create a Nest account – even if they don't own any Nest product – Nest has posted advertisements seeking someone to head up Nest …

One of the reasons Facebook has been driving the Open Compute Project is to break the network switch market out of its long habit of being proprietary on the inside. Broadcom's decision to adopt the Open Network Switch Library (OpenNSL) is a big shift in that space, so The Register talked to Ram Velaga, senior VP of Broadcom's …

There are faint hints that the Australia's federal government might reconsider the policy that ties future research funds to its attempt to deregulate university fees.
At the same time, the Chief Scientist Ian Chubb has gone on the record to call the policy a serious problem for research.
The faint scent of a change in policy …

Like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, except dressed as 900-pound gorillas, Cisco and Microsoft have tied the knot again to expand their cloud partnership.
Faced with the question “how can we get more clouds to run exactly the same infrastructure?”, the two have riveted OS platforms with network and computing platforms to …

The InifiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) hopes to ward off the risk of an Ethernet invasion in the ranks of HPC users with a renewed focus on manageability and visibility.
Such features have just appeared in release 1.3 of the Volume 1 standard. The IBTA's Bill Lee told The Register that as HPC clusters grow, “you want to be …

Open Compute Summit
When Facebook started down the path of creating the Open Compute Project (OCP), part of its reasoning was that too many vendors hide the underlying silicon from the world of users.
That part of the project seems to be having its desired effect, with Broadcom using the OCP Summit to announce that it's going to give developers API …

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has driven its nope-mobile down to Collins Street and dropped a couple of tons of forget-it at the door of Australia's dominant carrier Telstra: rather than putting up prices for fixed voice and broadband services, the carrier's asked to cop a price cut.
The regulator …

Open Compute Summit
Mellanox has tipped two technologies into the Open Compute Project: an optical data centre interconnect, and a NIC that adds multi-host networking to Facebook's Yosemite chassis specification.
The optical spec is designed to help push OCP technologies into the HPC world, with a framework that Mellanox reckons can ultimately …

Dwarf galaxies circling the Milky Way, some with only a few hundred stars, could yield new hints about dark matter, according to boffins from the University of Cambridge and the Dark Energy Survey.
The two groups independently discovered the dwarf galaxies while combing over first year's worth of data published by the Dark …

Open Compute Summit
While Facebook is likely to dominate news out of the Open Compute Project Summit in San Jose, Microsoft and Big Switch Networks have also brought along major announcements to the confab.
From Redmond comes the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI), its latest contribution to the project. The SAI – which Mellanox is demonstrating on …

Vid
“That's odd” must be a scientist's favourite phrase: a set of images of a distant supernova has shown off a phenomenon first predicted more than 50 years ago in 1964.
The supernova was spotted in Hubble images by Dr Patrick Kelly of Berkeley while searching for distant galaxies – and because of the effect of gravitational …

One of the things we've been asked about our project to figure out how to improve network performance at the Wirliyajarrayi Learning Centre in the remote Australian town of Willowra is why we are bothering.
It's a decent question to ask because Australia is building a new Long Term Satellite Solution (LTSS) that promises multi- …

Apparently, the growing hobby of tagging along with “Microsoft tech support” scam calls to waste their time is starting to bug the scammers, with a Canadian man reportedly threatened by a caller from India.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) says Jakob Dulisse of Nelson in British Columbia played along with the caller …

MWC 2015
Huawei has talked up its plans for 5G at Mobile World Congress, with an emphasis on building its patent book for the next mobile standard.
The company is already in fifth place in European patent applicants for 2014 according to the European Patent Office, and had nearly 500 patents granted in that year. New filings across its …

A political impasse is putting at risk Australia's participation in the ginormous Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope*, along with a slew of other major research science projects.
The impasse centres on a plan to "deregulate" Australia's universities by allowing them to charge higher fees to make up for reduced …

Cisco wants to keep it in the family: since the Internet of Things is going to be a source of lots of data, it's signed reseller agreements with Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR.
The agreement will give customers a single source of IoT comms integrated with the data analytics it reckons enterprises will need, both to make sense of …

New Zealand snooped on friendly Pacific island nations' communications to hand the haul to the NSA, according to the latest nugget to pop out of Edward Snowden's PR machine.
Snowden newsletter The Intercept has shared its latest drop with the New Zealand Herald, saying in 2009 the country's Government Communications Security …

MWC2015
The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) carriers' club has sorted out its ideas of what 5G's future, and set forth a blueprint of its preferred vision of a post-4G world.
The 5G world is going to have to get cracking, though: the roadmap, with contributions from luminaries like AT&T, BT, China Mobile, DoCoMo, SingTel, …

MWC 2015
Juniper Networks has placed both feet under the Network Function Virtualisation, using Mobile World Congress as the venue to demonstrate virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE).
The solution it demonstrated in conjunction with Amdocs is based on the virtualised version of its MX router, first announced in November 2014, and a …

Australia's second-largest ISP Optus has followed the third-largest, iiNet, by announcing Australians will be able to watch Netflix without the downloads counting towards their monthly data cap.
The announcement places pressure on Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra, to do likewise. But as Telstra is a major shareholder in …

Australian politicians and activists frustrated at their fellows' apparent indifference to the metadata data retention debate have cause to thank the National Rugby League (NRL).
In its laudable battle against bad behaviour by the inadvertent role models who sign up to play in its competition. the NRL has announced new rules for …

Who said Ethernet was dull? Oracle certainly doesn't: it's floated a couple of switches down the slipway and off into the oceans of the data centre.
It's nearly refreshing to have something as vanilla as an Ethernet switch, sorry two Ethernet switches, announced among all the foam emitted by aspirant supplanters of the handful- …

After a couple of years of selective reveals to favoured media, Google has made an uncharacteristic to-all-comers announcement about its broadband plans at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The Chocolate Factory bought drone-maker Titan Aerospace in 2014, and has told the conference its solar-powered drones will be carrying …

The old conundrum is right: not only is light both a wave and a particle, but Swiss boffins have captured it behaving as both at the same time.
And this is what it looks like (click for the bigger version):
EPFL wave and particle image
Upper image - light as wave
Lower image - light as quanta
Image: EPFL
The researchers …

Second-tier telco and major ISP iiNet has forked over AU$204,000 to settle infringement notices from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
The notices were issued as a result of iiNet's advertising for its Naked Broadband 250GB plan, which the consumer watchdog says didn't “prominently state the total minimum price …

Brocade is putting its foot into the mobile infrastructure hokey-pokey dance, announcing that it wants to buy Connectem, a specialist in virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) software.
The target had recently announced that it was one of the winners of a Telekom Austria project to run up a virtualised LTE core network for its …

MWC 2015
Cisco has clouded up a new way to snoop on mobile users “combine network, user, and business intelligence … to realise business outcomes.”
Announced at Mobile World Congress, Mobility IQ is a SaaS offering that the company says provides real-time information on Wi-Fi, 3G and LTE networks, covering network performance and user …

In a story reminiscent of the movie Gravity, near-Earth orbits have a bunch of new space junk chunks to worry about after a satellite exploded.
After an event was first noticed by orbital tracking company CelesTrak, the US Air Force has confirmed to Space News that the 20-year-old Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight …

MWC 2015
Citrix is taking a leap into carrier-grade network function virtualisation (NFV) with a new release of its NetScaler platform.
Let's take the numbers first: the two rack unit NetScaler MPX 25000 series is a 160 gigabit-per-second appliance. Citrix says it lets operators crank up the data plane of their SGi-LAN to 3.5 Tbps. The …

Microsoft has expanded its cloudy support for Docker, adding Docker Machine to Azure and Hyper-V, and supporting Docker Swarm.
With the release of Docker Machine 1.0 Beta, Redmond has blogged that users can create a host under Windows using the lightweight Linux boot2docker.
Docker Machine is designed for an easy install. As …

Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra, has joined World+Dog in promising to take the lead in the 5G race, with a roadmap that reaches all the way to next year.
The main thrust of the carrier's talk to Mobile World Congress and accompanying canned release is actually the immediate future of its 4G network.
The carrier promises …

An Australian security researcher says a bunch of Seagate NAS devices carry serious vulnerabilities and should be kept away from the Internet.
OJ Reeves of Beyond Binary says the Seagate Business NAS line, up to version 2014.00319, carries old versions of PHP, CodeIgniter and Lighttpd. All of these, the post notes, have remotely …

The nano-sat launcher aboard the International Space Station has stopped malfunctioning and started spitting its payload into space as intended.
The NanoRacks deployment was due last year, but was interrupted when it started launching its 6kg Planet Labs Doves satellites without instructions.
The fault was traced to over- …

Jockeying for position in the yet-to-be-real 5G market continues, with Huawei announcing that it's going to demo a new air interface at Mobile World Congress in March.
The Chinese giant will be showing off techniques it calls Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) and Filtered-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (F-OFDM).
In …

Update: Cisco denies report
China appears to have lopped Cisco and Apple from the list of vendors approved to sell to its government.
A Reuters analysis of official data also says Intel, McAfee and Citrix were also lopped, and the total number of foreign tech suppliers on the list is down by one-third.
Suppliers of imported security-related products have …

Puppet Labs has added support for Arista kit to its automation suite.
The native Arista Extensible Operating System – EOS – module and Forge Module means Puppet Enterprise can now reach into data centres built on Arista's switches, the company says.
It also means that changes to networking kit can happen automatically and …

The US Army Research Labs (ARL) has put forward a plan to outrun China in the supercomputer stakes, develop quantum computing, and create The Terminator.*
In spite – or perhaps because – of a likely budget squeeze, the ARL says it needs to “harness the potential of computational sciences and emerging high-performance computers ( …

It's a matter of ups and down for the National Broadband Network: the fibre rollout (which will be replaced by hybrid fibre/coax (HFC) and node/basement fibre in future geographies) accelerated and the activation rate improved.
At the same time, a host of factors (such as a construction focus on adding lead-ins to homes formerly …

HP looks like breaking its long embargo on large acquisitions by snaffling Aruba Networks, according to emerging reports.
Bloomberg's report cites the usual “people with knowledge of the matter” as saying the two companies are in talks, adding that the deal is in such early stages that it could still fall through.
The Wi-Fi …

Australia's data retention proposal suggests the nation's telcos and ISPs need to store data for two years. But agencies accessing the data can seemingly keep it forever and are not, to date, required to securely store or destroy data they retrieve from the nation's putative data trove of personal information, miscalled " …

Researchers from Australia and China have turned up an unfeasibly large black hole that almost dates back to the beginning of time.
At 12 billion times the Sun's mass, and in a quasar that was a million billion times as energetic as the Sun, it's not actually the largest black hole ever spotted. However, its redshift indicates …